for some reason my xbox live wasn't connecting for the longest time, which is fine as sadly i rarely use it. but with my new love for guitar hero 3, i wanted to see if there were any new/free tracks i could download. i suspect my problems are with using OpenDNS as since i started using them i noticed the problem. anyhow, it started working again so i was able to take a look.
i noticed a free 'holiday' track of we three kings that was available for download. it's a pretty good track for GH3 as well as a nice twist on a holiday classic. after playing it i wanted to see if the guitar track itself was available for download on iTunes (i think it is great how the GH3 site integrated with iTunes so people could immediately navigate to the tracks on the game).
well, it wasn't available, but i researched and found the composer's site, steve ouimette. what is interesting to find out is he's the same composer who created 7 other tracks for GH3 that you would have thought were just created by the original artists. from steve's site i learned that he created: Rock You Like A Hurricane, School’s Out, Barracuda, Talk Dirty To Me, Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll, Hit Me With Your Best Shot, and Mississippi Queen, and the electric version of The Devil Went Down To Georgia.
in a QA post he talks about TDWDTG track...i particularly like the question of "Isn’t it blasphemy to destroy a classic song like TDWDTG?" interesting stuff to learn about some of the history behind the music of games, etc. glad to have found steve's site. reminds me of some of the discussions with steve ball and the audio behind operating systems...but admittedly this is funner.
from the geniuses who determined that only a one quart bag full of 3.5 oz liquids is permitted, comes new rules about bringing lithium-ion batteries in united states travel.
what seems odd to me is that the restriction is on checked baggage and not carry-on luggage per se. from the site, it indicates that a spare battery is something not installed on the device. and if you wanted to bring a spare lithium ion battery along, you have to put it in your carry-on luggage as putting it in your checked luggage is forbidden. what?!
what concerns me (as i don't believe this will affect my day-to-day travel...i don't travel with spare batteries that much. but i've recently gotten some camera equipment that has a lot of batteries: 2 for the camera, one huge li-ion for the light equipment. and the bummer is that all of it won't fit in a case that is carry-on size...so it has to be checked.
so now the question becomes...what happens when you leave your luggage with TSA to be processed and you walk to your gate...do they make a discovery of a battery and then decide not to send your luggage? take out the battery and replace it with a note "sorry, we have your battery now"?
brilliant.
this time from telerik. telerik has just announced their RAD Controls for Silverlight 1.1(2.0). they have a site up with some demonstrations, etc. (obviously requiring silverlight 1.1 to render). they have controls like:
- upload
- button
- combobox
- listbox
- menus
- progress bar
- tab strip
- textbox
- treeview
- slider
- and some animation controls
a pretty comprehensive list. very cool. i've always been impressed with the partner ecosystem of microsoft 3rd party developers. telerik is no substitute. i knew that they'd be one that would be providing a great control story for silverlight.
take a look at their demo site and play around.
i've got a few messages about 'hey, where did the silverlight project template go in visual studio 2008? what the heck, doesn't microsoft want us to create projects?'
trouble is that it is there, but different...you know same, but different.
if you have visual studio 2008 installed, make sure you install the silverlight tools for visual studio 2008. yeah, i know it says 'tools for alpha' -- just install it would ya. after you install it, you'll have the project templates for silverlight 1.1 2.0 as well as for 1.0. but where is it?
File...New Web Site... then you should see this:
that's what you want. hope this helps.
